Seven Essential Books for Guarding Grammar

The books I recommend here are not sacred texts, but they are good guides. Each performs a noble service: they protect the structure of thought and remind us that language is not a toy but a tool.

“The Allegory of Grammar” from The Seven Liberal Arts, by Laurent de La Hyre (1650s)

It is a curious fact that the modern world, so boastful of its cleverness and technical prowess, is increasingly suspicious of grammar. One need only attend a public forum, glance at a school assignment, or even (heaven help us) browse a corporate advertisement to find sentences that have lost both shape and soul. Language, once a medium for communicating truth and beauty, now totters under the strain of haste, noise, and sentimentality. We are living in an age that, having lost confidence in meaning, no longer understands the benefits of clarity. But as anyone who has attempted to think a thought knows, grammar is not a tyrant; it is a midwife. It does not constrict the mind; it frees it to speak.

The books I recommend here are not sacred texts, but they are good guides. Each of them, in its way, performs a noble service: they protect the structure of thought, guard the inheritance of our civilization, and remind us that language is not a toy but a tool—a sword, even, when rightly used. I offer them not as curiosities but as companions for any reader who wishes not only to write well, but to think well, and perhaps to live more wisely thereby.

1. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White

This slender book is among the most unassuming of allies, and yet it carries a weight of truth far beyond its modest size. Strunk and White offer us, not a comprehensive grammar, but a set of clear principles, each grounded in the idea that language ought to serve the reader before it serves the writer’s vanity. “Omit needless words” is the sort of commandment that would not be out of place in the proverbs of Solomon. What matters most in their instruction is not cleverness, but fidelity to meaning. The writer, they remind us, is a steward, not a sovereign.

2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

If Strunk and White are grave and concise, Truss is their spirited cousin—no less committed to truth, but inclined to express it with mischief. Her book is, in one sense, an extended lament for the abuse of punctuation; but it is also a vigorous defense of the idea that even the smallest marks in our writing can hold vast consequences for meaning. A misplaced comma can alter the destiny of a sentence, and thus the thought it conveys. Truss writes with humour, but her aim is serious. She calls us to attention—to notice the very mechanisms of language we have come to take for granted.

3. The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric by Sister Miriam Joseph

Here is a book of deeper roots and older traditions. Sister Miriam Joseph reminds us that grammar is not merely the etiquette of writing, but one part of a larger intellectual formation. The Trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—is the path by which a human being is trained to reason, to argue, and to persuade. This is no small task, nor a fashionable one, but it is indispensable for a civilization that believes truth exists and can be known. Her prose is scholarly, but it glows with the conviction that language is a ladder that may lead us from confusion toward wisdom.

4. The Well-Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

This delightful volume may seem at first an eccentric cousin at the grammatical table, but do not be deceived by its whimsy. Gordon’s work is no idle amusement—it is a vivid reminder that grammar, for all its rules and rigour, is also a deeply creative act. She shows us, through imaginative examples and elegant phrasing, that punctuation is not simply the mechanical ticking of language, but the rhythm of its music. Her book is as much an invitation as an instruction—an invitation to love the language, not merely to obey it.

5. An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

Lewis himself, the master of plain speech and high thought, offers in this little book a meditation on reading that touches, inevitably, on the nature of language itself. His thesis—that the way we read reveals the kind of persons we are—implies also that language is not neutral, but formative. He insists that we read generously, with humility, and that we learn to enter the mind of another without haste or prejudice. This approach to literature applies equally to the study of grammar: for grammar, too, invites us to set aside our ego and learn the ways of order and meaning.

6. First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran

Moran’s work is a quiet revelation. Without fanfare, he offers the reader a vision of writing that is neither mechanical nor mysterious. A sentence, he suggests, is not a technical feat but a human one—a structure of thought, made visible and audible. Like Lewis, he believes that attention is the beginning of love, and thus the beginning of all good writing. His tone is neither scolding nor sentimental. Rather, he invites us to treat the sentence as we might treat a garden: not with superstition or neglect, but with patience, discipline, and joy.

7. Woe Is I by Patricia T. O’Conner

O’Conner’s book is the most companionable of the set. It does not pretend to be exhaustive or profound, but it is thoroughly sane. In a culture that either reveres grammar as a fetish or discards it as a relic, she restores it to its rightful place: as a tool for communication. Her tone is cheerful but exact, helpful without being hectoring. She dispels many of the myths that haunt English usage (the fear of the split infinitive among them) and reminds us that rules serve meaning, not the other way round. Her book is the sort of guide one might keep by the desk—not as an oracle, but as a friend.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.